Talk:Japanese/Archive 2

Transwiki
You may find this transwiki useful. If there is another book where such content may be useful, please leave a note on the relevant talk page. Thanks! – Mike.lifeguard  &#124; talk 05:00, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I've listed it on the Japanese/Contents page. --Swift (talk) 03:42, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Hiragana Lessons
I've been revamping the hiragana lessons here User:Retropunk/Japanese_Junk_Page to replace the current header page for the lessons This merges some of the data in Japanese/Reading Hiragana. The rest of the information in the Reading Japanese page has been better illustrated or doesn't need to be in "Reading Japanese" (i.e., devoicing and pitch). The other sections were either stated in the updated page, or in the lessons. I'm open for updating the page. When it's good to go, we should probably delete Japanese/Reading Hiragana and the hiragana lessons under here. I want to emphasize that the other data under the later section may be useful. I'm only talking about removing the a through n group pages. --Retropunk (talk) 02:36, 15 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I went ahead and updated the page. Japanese/Reading Hiragana is outdated, and should probably be merged completely with Japanese/Lessons/Lesson_6.  --Retropunk (talk) 07:27, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Conjugation tables
I completely revamped the Conjugation table without Romaji book. I think we should move this to a module like Japanese/Verb conjugation table or something similar and delete the Conjugation table with Romaji.

I added some colours to make it easier to connect the legend with individual verb forms. I'm by no means a graphics person, so if anyone is good with colour schemes, please give us a hand.

I also transposed the tables so they now only take three lines each. This has cut the length of the page by half. --Swift (talk) 18:32, 16 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I've moved the page. --Swift (talk) 03:29, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Introductions
Cleaning up the introductions, I found the Japanese/Introduction/About useless. I'd like to delete this whole section (see the discussion).
 * Japanese/Introduction
 * Japanese/Introduction/About

I'd also be interested in peoples' oppinions on what to put on those pages ( and if renaming them will help new contributors. It might clarify to call them something like Japanese/The Japanese language and Japanese/About this project. It's a bit of a colour-of-the-bike-shed decision, but figured I'd check to see if anyone had good any good suggestions for a clearer useful scope. --Swift (talk) 03:21, 17 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I've decided that "Preface" would probably fit well as a title for the contents of Japanese/Introduction/About. I'm not really sure about the "Introduction", though. --Swift (talk) 06:03, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Adding material to the main page
I've put up a rough structure for the main page and stolen some material from Retropunk. I've bolded the links that are also on the front page. Not sure if that's the best notation, though. --Swift (talk) 03:39, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Japanese in other languages
I found a link to Japonais and added a bunch of language links which I just wanted to draw attention to. The French book looks brilliant and is certainly a good source of inspiration for presentaion. --Swift (talk) 15:24, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Phrasebook
I've been playing a bit around with the phrasebook. I put it up at Japanese/Phrasebook and started to move in content that's linked to from Japanese/Contents. I also set up a template at Template:Japanese Phrasebook entry to set up phrase lists.

I've been wondering whether this should be a seperate book. It might help to have a clearer seperation between the two since the phrasebook should probably not have any Japanese scripts. Higher level students should be studying grammar anyway. Splitting them up might, however, reduce the amount of collaboration. --Swift (talk) 02:53, 4 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, I think it absolutely should be. I've moved it to Japanese Phrasebook. --Swift (talk) 09:24, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Kanji reading template
I created Template:Japanese kanji readings for use in kanji lists such as the ones linked to from Japanese/Kanji. Just wanted to bring this to people's attention in case anyone would be interested or able to comment on it. --Swift (talk) 02:37, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Ahh, yes. I was making one... but been too busy with work to really work on it.  I don't see myself having much time for the next month or so, but I'll try and come on every once in awhile. --Retropunk (talk) 03:41, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
 * It appears that there's an alignment problem with the examples. They vary heavily.  I'm not sure this could be solved. --Retropunk (talk) 06:59, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Better now? --Swift (talk) 11:56, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Not sure if you noticed, but the image libraryis severely lacking for the red images. It wouldn't be difficult to make these images, but it's time consuming.  Most of the time, the Japanese/Chinese-Traditional use the same strokes, but there are a few differences.  I'll try to add the images as I can. --Retropunk (talk) 05:11, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I did notice. I've contacted the Commons stroke order project members shortly before my old computer died to ask them about the status of the project and how to sort out the issue of Chinese vs. Japanese stroke orders. Currently, the Chinese stroke order is the default with Japanese versions where these differ.
 * Have you visited the Commons project yet? Are you planning on contributing the missing characters? --Swift (talk) 15:52, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm aware of the CJK site. The main problem is that most of the strokes are for Chinese traditional characters.  There are some Japanese Kanji that do not follow stroke pattern nor the exact same character.  Some are the same as the simplified characters.  Some are completely different from both.  To get an accurate list, we would really need to start a Japanese-list in conjunction to the Chinese list.--Retropunk (talk) 06:44, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, the way things were going on Commons, there was a great team doing a lot of work on the Chinese characters. They later added Japanese versions on to them as they found discreptancies. That system worked well as long as the Chinese characters were the main part of the project. Modifying the project to allow seperate Chinese and Japanese sub-projects will take a bit of work but may well be worth while to make use of the work already done.
 * The Commons project was working on that when the core team retired from the project. I've been wanting to work on this as I'd love to modify it to make it easier for people to join and add the occational image. --Swift (talk) 16:44, 8 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I've completed adding the templates to the kanji pages. As Retropunk has noted, there are many images missing. I've spent a some time looking into the resources at Commons. There are some Japanese-specific images but I couldn't find any systematic overview of which characters share stroke orders with the simplified Chinese characters.
 * At some point we'll have to systematically check everything. We may want to consider a fairly extensive overhaul of the Stroke Order Project on Commons before starting this. --Swift (talk) 19:13, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Kana template
Stumbled across a second set of hiragana stroke order lists. Decied that a couple of templates might be useful to standardise these. I copied some of the markup from Japanese/Kana/Lessons/Hiragana/Lesson 1 and made Template:Japanese kana navigation and Template:Japanese kana. --Swift (talk) 03:42, 4 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I've just finished updating the hiragana pages with these templates. --Swift (talk) 01:36, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I won't get around to doing the katakana until I set up Linux on my new computer (for which I'm missing an optical drive). It's just not worth doing without a proper editor. --Swift (talk) 11:57, 8 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I added some extra features to Template:Japanese kana so that the voiced and plosive characters would be displayed beside the clear ones.
 * I'm completing the the katakana pages. --Swift (talk) 18:12, 30 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Phew. The katakana are now done. The hiragana haven't been updated to use the new template format (putting the voiced and plosive with the clear sounds).
 * There is still work to be done on polishing the kana pages, though, but I think the structure is now pretty much in place.
 * I'm also thinking of adding the audio links to the template in the same way that the image links are currently added. It would create a whole bunch of red links, but I don't think it's a big problem since these are needed anyway for the pronunciation guide. --Swift (talk) 05:08, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Mnemonics
I've never used mnemonics for anything other than "る" and "ろ". Can anyone share their thoughts about whether we need seperate mnemoncis for the clear, voiced and plosive characters, or whether it's sufficient to have them for the clear sounds alone. --Swift (talk) 05:08, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't see a reason to have separate mnemonics. However, I don't see why we should restrict them for the clear syllables.  If there are no alternatives, we can use either of the three.--Retropunk (talk) 05:07, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure if I got what you're saying. Is it that you see no reason to have seperate mnemonics, but you don't either see a reason why not to have them? --Swift (talk) 16:16, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't see a reason to have a mnemonic for each syllable (clear, voiced, and plosive), but I don't see a reason to restrict the mnemonic to just clear. If voiced seems more appropriate than forcing a mnemonic for clear, then we should use the voiced mnemonic.  --Retropunk (talk) 05:51, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Kana page
I've created a Japanese/Kana page which now links to all of the kana pages (I have only updated a single hiragana page with the new template, though &mdash; comments appreciated). I've merged in stuff about the yōon and added links to drilling software.

I know that not everyone will agree with this approach, but would like to explain my rationale. I'm interested in comments and critisims, I'm not married to this approach and am willing to change my mind if I hear a good argument against it. I would, however, like the opportunity to convice others of the benefit of my proposal so that we can remove the redundancy. At this stage in the book, however, I'm not that bothered by duplicate material if different contributors see value in each version. In the case that people don't agree, I have no problem with retaining both approaches.

My approach is to join the two kana pages since a lot of the material on Japanese/Reading_Hiragana is also directly applicaple to katakana. At the same time, I want to seperate the pronunciation from the discussion of these scripts where possible. That would include the "mora", "chōon", "pitch accent" and "devoicing" which I belive belong rather on Japanese/Pronunciation. The pronunciation of the "voiced and plosive", "sokuon" and "yōon" are represented in the kana scripts, and therefore I believe we should include those with the kana discussion as well as on the pronunciation page.

I understand that, as it stands, the pronunciation page doesn't teach pronunciation very well and is more of a guide riddled with the inadequacies of describing sounds with comparison to words in English &mdash; a language infamous for its wide variety of pronunciations. Ideally, we'll find a native Japanese speaker with a nice voice (there was an active person on Commons a while back) to make proper sound examples to turn that page into a decent resource for pronunciation.

We would then end up with two pages where one focuses on the pronunciation of Japanese, while the other discusses the syllabary scripts with which the sounds are written. These can (and should) be well connected by cross-referencing to integrate them where needed. --Swift (talk) 04:42, 6 August 2008 (UTC)